


the same

by cryingwillow



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Infinity War, Canonical Character Death, Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Friendship, Gen, Temporary Character Death, but somehow this is still in progress pls believe in me, endgame rlly said screw stevebucky lives, hhng checking out these tags a while after endgame and, not touching anything else theres enough death in canon already, temporary major character death, this fic could be rated gen tbh, will be updated asap but can definitely be read as a complete fic now
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-26 17:22:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17750228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryingwillow/pseuds/cryingwillow
Summary: Barely anything is the same, in this time. He seeks out the fight, the purpose he has come to feel meaningless without, but now the earth is crumbling around his feet, and like always—everything collapses.(or; steve rogers, a boy out of brooklyn, and the years)





	the same

**Author's Note:**

> /////
> 
>  
> 
> it's been a long, long time (since he since they since he knew how)
> 
>  
> 
> /////

The world is spread out before him, all its unfamiliar horizons and enticing imperfections, raw and open.  
  
“What makes you happy?” a man with warm eyes asks him, smile inviting. His expression is somehow simultaneously both light and serious.  
  
He thinks, let his mind roam the landscape, barren as it is for him.  
  
“I don’t know,” Steve shrugs, and ignores where the ground cracks, continuously, shattering around his feet.  


 

 

////

  
  
  
his smile cracks. he doesn’t belong here. he is nothing, an empty vessel. why is he here, alone, a man who knows what it feels like to die, and now to be plucked mercilessly out of time, when  


 

 

////

  
  
  
“Bucky?”  
  
Everything, time itself is suspended, the fragments of ground hanging in the air below his feet, supporting him with the most fragile of holds upon reality where it threatens to crack violently around him. The sky, the air is thick, and it threatens to solidify, and then splinter where his voice pierces the sudden silence.  
  
His heart isn’t beating—he doesn’t _understand_ —  
  
The Winter Soldier’s stare is void, an empty, floating weight.  
  
“Who the hell is Bucky?”  
  
And just like that, everything collapses.  
  
By the time Steve manages to pick himself out of the debris, barely enough to draw a shaking breath, there is no more reason to do so.  


 

 

///

  
  
  
he throws himself into this task with emotion, with _purpose_. it really has been too long since he knew what he was doing, what he was striving for, and he is consumed with the absurd inability to sit still and the constant squeezing of guilt at his insides and the even more absurd and truly awful knowledge that progress, the very embodiment of purpose and meaning is, maybe, the only thing  


 

 

///

  
  
  
“Steve?”  
  
He turns to see Sam at the door, silhouetted from behind in the hotel’s warm, golden light.  
  
Sam leans against the doorframe casually, crossing his arms and fixing Steve with a focused stare. “You okay, man?”  
  
The dim light hides his wet eyes, the bands of pain tightening around his chest.  
  
“Yeah,” he replies. “Yeah, I’m fine.”  
  
Sam frowns, but purses his lips in silence for a few moments. Then; “You sure you’re okay to spend another day out there tomorrow? It takes a lot outta you.”  
  
Steve shrugs, smiling, small and sad. “So does not doing anything.”  
  
Sam returns his smile with the same bitter understanding he has come to expect from the kind-eyed man, nodding slowly.  
  
“I hate it,” Steve says suddenly, looking up to meet Sam’s eyes. “It’s like—I still can’t believe he’s _alive_ , he’s here, and then he isn’t. It’s like losing him all over again. It’s like I left my chance to look for him and actually find him somewhere in the forties, and now I’m just scared, all the time—”  
  
He feels a warm hand on his back, and clenches his eyes shut against the sudden hot tears that spring to his eyes.  
  
“It’s okay,” Sam says softly. “This is gonna work, Steve.”  
  
Steve suddenly feels raw and exposed, even simply in the light of his friend’s non-judgemental eyes.  
  
“Yeah, it has to,” he says, all in a rush of cold air, and if the earth trembles until its foundations crumble to pieces, if his shoulders are shaking, Sam’s hand doesn’t shift and he doesn’t say a word.  


 

 

//

  
  
  
and maybe it won’t, he thinks sometimes, it’ll never be the same—but he doesn’t tell sam that, now. saying it out loud is almost like an admission, like acceptance, and he keeps it between himself and the cold, mindless blue eyes that shake him wide awake in a sudden, hysterical terror, always  


 

 

//

  
  
  
Maybe the ground stops collapsing beneath his feet, but the rubble offers no better footholds.  
  
Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, James Buchanan Barnes, his best friend his support his _Bucky_ is staring at him again, and all the words on his lips are names, identities that he isn’t even sure are accurate anymore, but desperately wants to be.  
  
Steve meets the eyes of the man standing beside him, face bathed in the mountains’ soft, white glow, and suppresses a surge of bitter affection. He shouldn’t, he can’t—but this has to be Bucky, not just because of the chiseled nose and soft chin, but because he can’t help himself any longer. It feels sudden, jarring, even if the feeling isn’t, but he feels like a skinny sixteen-year-old picking fights in Brooklyn back alleys and looking up at Bucky’s face, his cocky grin—  
  
No, he thinks.  
  
The parallels are there—  
  
No, he thinks, and his shield is slamming into Tony- no, _Iron Man_ ’s chest mindlessly, all too consciously. He doesn’t know. This isn’t the same.  
  
It isn’t the same.  


 

 

/

  
  
  
it hurts. every bone in his body aches when he walks away from tony, into the icy wind, and beside him stands the winter. it roars, snatching bits and pieces of time, sending snow whirling through the air, and he stops. what has he done. What has he  


 

 

/

  
  
  
“He’s never going to be the same man he was seventy years ago, Captain Rogers,” the young girl says, and he can almost imagine the way her eyes brim with rough sympathy. Would, if the words hadn’t already sent him stumbling to a nearby chair, an awfully raw moment that makes him glad this is a phone call.  
  
“Do you mean… do you mean he isn’t—?” The question dies on his lips.  
  
Shuri laughs, not unkindly. “Captain Rogers, are you the same person you were seventy years ago?”  
  
“No,” Steve says readily, thinking of many things and also nothing at all, which is indicative in itself.  
  
Shuri hums, and he knows she understands that he means more than curling biceps and a resistance to illness.  
  
“But he’s recovering,” she says softly after a few moments. “Like you should be.”  
  
Steve laughs dryly. “It’s not the same thing, though.”  
  
“No,” she says, voice hilting with a note of disagreement. “No, it isn’t. But as long as you know that, it doesn’t have to matter.”  
  
He grunts.  
  
“Come by Wakanda sometime next month,” and he can hear the smile in Shuri’s voice. She says it so persuasively he feels a twinge of preemptive guilt.  
  
Steve pauses. “Okay.”  


 

 

0

  
  
  
he can’t, he doesn’t,  


 

 

0

  
  
  
for now. When he finally does, it is out of necessity, and his heart is going a million miles an hour and nothing is right anymore. He feels it pound out the emotion, the palpable fear brimming in the cabin. There is so much compressed into the jet that it is almost a relief to hear the door slide open, letting it all slide out into the cool Wakandan air. It would be a relief, but for all the words he keeps swallowed, waiting, and the figure he knows he will see, behind T’Challa, behind Okoye, behind—  
  
Bucky is laughing. Something almost painful, relieving, bubbles up inside him, and Steve finally throws his arms around his best friend, and all the words he had rehearsed in his head like _I’m sorry_ and _I would’ve come_ and _I missed you I missed you I missed you_ die on his lips, go without saying.  
  
They step back and look at each other. Bucky’s eyes are tired, but why wouldn’t they be? They are on the brink of war, once again, and they’ve seen more war than— _almost—_ everyone else they know, more than they need to see in a lifetime.  
  
“I missed you, you little punk,” and he would feel guilty again but Bucky is sporting a genuine grin, one he can feel mirrored on his own face.  
  
Steve opens his mouth to respond, momentarily distracted by Shuri passing behind him and raising a cocky eyebrow.  
  
“Me too.”  
  
Everything is different, from the people around him, to the mountains, partially obscured in the distance, to the way he is being looked at, and everything else. But his smile is small and it speaks volumes.  


 

 

Ø

  
  
  
the inevitable fight is almost the only thing that is still the same, because there are always men like this. more than steve cares to count. but the outcome  


 

 

Ø

  
  
  
the outcome  


 

 

Ø

  
  
  
the outcome?

(“what did it cost?”)

  


 

 

Ø

  


“Steve?”

  


 

 

Ø

  
  
  
(“everything.”)  
  
collapses.  


 

 

ØØØ

  
  
  
He kneels in the destruction, the real, physical destruction, the ash and death, with nothing but frantic denial. The moment replays in his mind, awful and fresh, and he just wants to wake up and shake away the dawning pain. There is nothing but abject horror squeezing his insides- he can’t breathe, his heart isn’t beating, he doesn’t _understand_ —  
  
There is no warm, unmoving hand on his shoulder. There is dust coating his fingertips, and he almost begs fate that he might fall too.  
  
“Oh, God,” he says quietly, without even realizing it. There are no snowy depths obscuring the ground. There is no wintry escape.  
  
Half the world might be gone, but his whole soul is, too, slaughtered on the ground in the mountains and the mist where it burns away in the sun’s glare without a trace.  


 

 

.

  
  
  
how many men can say they know how it feels to drown, to feel every inch of their body burn, to choke and suffocate slowly, begging for the release of incoherence?  
  
steve knows before this day, and bucky grows smaller, smaller, silhouetted against the pale drop behind him—  
  
he knows.  
  
he wakes up and the world as he knows it is gone, gone gone gone, and why didn’t they pull him out earlier why didn’t they find him why didn’t they just _leave him there_ —  
  
he knows.  
  
and the winter soldier’s eyes are empty, and hydra is inside them both, only steve chose this, steve was a part of this, steve _did_ this—  
  
he knows.  
  
he is pulled out again, only to throw himself into another fight, another purpose, and the pieces are coming together and they are falling apart—  
  
he knows.  
  
this time, nobody even makes it to the ground. everything crumbles around his feet. ashes to ashes.  
  
he knows.  
  
but never before has he known it like this.

 

 

.

  
  
  
the fight might be

the same

but  
  
nothing else is.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> s write something that actually makes sense challenge
> 
> but thank you so much for reading i hope you liked this?? im not entirely sure what this is either n im relatively new to this fandom so pls point out anything i butchered and if i totally messed up characterization and seriously just anything!! id love to hear from u
> 
> also wanted to point out that i Know thats not the lines steve n bucky say to each other in iw but uh. they might say em off screen what do u know. also the original dialogue felt really really clunky bc it didnt fit with the theme of this story so uhhh SORRY i also really suck at writing dialogue esp in fic so any pointers u have would be amazing to hear
> 
> i love sam and shuri vvvvvvv much and id stuff even more of them into this fic (!!esp sam!!) if i could 
> 
> im hoping to continue this and write a second part to conclude this after i watch endgame!! depending on what happens in the movie ofc but. We're Not Done Here Yet and maybe even writing this before endgame comes out is a bad idea but HEY im good at those!
> 
> if u made it through all that first of all wow im! pretty shocked! and second of all thank you for reading it means the world to me <3333


End file.
